Everyday life is filled with risks. Whether it be the cars we drive to work or the appliances we use at home, no technology we use is completely fool-proof. Of course, there are safety ratings and warranties, but you can never really be too sure. We often become jaded and assume nothing bad will ever happen, but sometimes you can't help to stop and think about the dangers hidden behind everyday items and activities.
You may not consider yourself a risk-taker, but these people reveal that you may be living life on the edge. The real-life stories below reveal some of the seemingly innocent products we use all the time that may not be as sturdy as we suspect. These stories may make you proceed with caution over the smallest of tasks! It's better to be safe than sorry, and these guys aren't taking any chances.
Don't forget to check the comment section below the article for more interesting stories!
#35 Quite Shocking, Actually
Surge strips. People buy $8 six-plug surge strips, then plug thousands of dollar into it. One surge and poof.
#34 Rigged Up And Completely Reckless
A friend of mine will use a floor jack to hold up his truck while he works under it instead of going to get some jack stands. He must trust a ten-cent O-ring more than I do.
#33 Yup, That's A Totally Safe Bet
Someone mailed in a multi-million dollar winning lottery ticket, that's a lot of faith to have in a forty-something cent stamp.
#32 Big Fat Nope
Not all of us, but bungee cords. You're jumping off a bridge with a rubber band tied around your ankles.
#31 Absolute Death Traps
Fair rides. Those things are put together with duct tape and faith.
#30 Literally A Matter Of Life And Death
Fire alarms/smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors. They're like $5 on Amazon and they could be the difference between life and death for your entire family.
#29 Scared Of Heights?
Ladders. You really don’t realize just how dangerous those things can be, especially if you’re more than a few feet up. If it’s not balanced properly or you take one wrong step, that could very well be the end for you. It’s so important that you have a strong and stable ladder because it’s not worth gambling with your life just to try and clean some leaves out of the gutter
#28 Well, When You Put It Like That
O rings! They're in just about anything with a seal in it, and they keep everything working properly. If they fail, we get stuff like the Challenger explosion.
#27 The Internet Is A Crazy Place
Data storage. Email companies give away gigabytes of the stuff. Even buying your own HD or SSD or renting on the cloud is pretty inexpensive. And we trust vast amounts of human knowledge to these systems.
#26 Underappreciated Car Part FOR SURE
This may sound weird, but windshield wipers. People like to spare expense for anything they don't actively think they use, like buying the worst wipers. I live in Florida, and when the time comes to flick the lever and see where you're going, bad wipers can be the difference between life and death. I spend an extra $20 so I don't end up like the nine accidents reported on my route to work by Waze.
#25 A Means Of Literal Survival
Water. We trust the water that comes through our taps. That comes in bottles. That we drink and turn into food and shower with. It costs us pennies a day and yet look at Flint... Not only can municipal water be toxic, but who knows how tainted our water can be?
#24 Always Look Both Ways Before Crossing
Paint.
A simple stripe down the middle of a road and we trust it like some sort of force field against foolish humans.
#23 You Are What You Eat
Food. We open these packaged items from hundreds of miles away, much of it requiring specific temperatures and other care, and just stick it in our bodies and hope that none of the dozens of people handling it didn't taint it or stick poison in it.
#22 Question. Everything.
Your teacher.
North Westchester Putnam Teaching Centers
#21 This Is WAY Too Accessible
People's driver's licenses. Not hard or expensive to get a license to drive a heavy, fast, metal object inches away from people driving the opposite way.
#20 The Harsh Reality
A door. It's usually a flimsy piece of wood that protects just about everything we own.
#19 This Is Unsettling — To The Stomach
Dishwashers.
Why do a thorough job cleaning those plates and utensils when there's a full house up front and you're getting paid below minimum wage?
Unitarian Universalist Association
#18 Have To Have Some Faith In Humanity
Stop signs.
We trust that other drivers will obey them. But some seem to think that stop means "Spin Tires On Pavement."
#17 The Price To Pay For Memes
Facebook.
They keep selling our data and we still come back to check out funny meme pages.
#16 Cue Panic Attack
That paper in your wallet.
You and I both trust that a dollar bill is worth $1 and can be exchanged for goods and services. Paper currency is valuable because we have all collectively agreed it is. If that trust is ever broken, it becomes second rate toilet paper or kindling.
#15 Never Getting Behind The Wheel Again
Brake pads. Literally relying on them thousands of times per day to save you and your family from a fiery, crushing death. And they cost, what, around $30 for a set?
#14 Some Very Sound Advice
Tires. You'd be surprised with how much a good set of tires changes how a car handles. $100 can be the difference between stopping in time or making that wet corner, and smashing into that car, or careening off of the road.
Spend the extra money, it can literally save your life.
#13 Definitely Not Child's Play
Daycare. It may feel expensive at times, but really daycare workers are paid very little, and we're entrusting our kids to them for like eight hours a day.
It is kinda crazy.
#12 Real Reassuring
Seat belt buckles. They will literally save your life but are mostly plastic and in years of auto sales, I find they're a lot more flimsy than you think.
#11 This Breaks Down The Science Of Cars Horrifically
We could sit here all day talking about cars. And other people's cars.
Boy did the mistake of buying a $450 car change how I look at cars. I mean at that price, sure it's unsafe. But there was a lot wrong that could be wrong on a lot of cars.
Brake pads, they're covered in this thread. Here's something else, my memory is hazy on this. The previous owner used compression fittings to replace a leaky piece of brake line. These $10/$15 connectors, in many places illegal for use on brake lines, many say to not use them for brake lines. This guy did. My understanding is under heavy braking they could burst, and your braking power would go away.
Now your car doesn't have them, I imagine and also hope. But does the car behind you while you're stopping? When you step out into that intersection, is the car meant to stop at the red light you're walking across sporting these? Sure, probably not unless it's a bucket of a car. But do you even think about the age or state of a car when expecting it to stop?
I believe (again, this was a while ago and I didn't really know cars) he showed me two bolts that were rusting out, and should they crumble, the steering's gone. Bolts don't cost a lot. There's a good number of pieces like this, that many just expect to work on even a car from a decade or two ago, in some areas with a dose of salt every winter.
Bearings. The bearings themselves aren't really expensive. Hub and bearing assemblies, Autozone sells mine $100 for the cheapest or $160 for the name brand. You can find Chinese-made ones for $40 online. The sales counts and number of reviews on eBay or Amazon are somewhat worrying. This is what holds the wheels on cars for years while they rocket around at 70 mph or whip this two-ton monster around quick turns. And you just take it on faith your lane neighbor's work. Especially with people ignoring the sound of them going bad.
Working on cars, jack stands. Like I understand they work because other people work on cars. But I still haven't been under my car to do this transmission fluid change, I'm not sure I'll do it. This $25 set of two is supposed to keep this huge 3,500lb hunk of metal from crushing me? Get the fuck outta here.
#10 New Yorkers Are Absolutely Fearless
Might not be related but trust in people who ride the NY subway? I see people standing several inches from the tracks during rush hour while a train is approaching. Scares me so much to imagine what could happen.
#9 Ouch.
Elevator doors. The door is closing and I see people stick their arms in to stop the doors from closing. You're putting an awful lot of faith in that sensor because if it closes and goes to the next floor with your arm in it, your gonna have a bad day.
#8 These Priorities Are Askew
Education.
1) Government spending is regularly throttled in this area.
2) Funding for the bureaucracy surrounding education is where most of the money goes, not to the costs of actual education.
The reason we have trust is that we've all experienced the great teachers— the ones who love what they do and who have the wherewithal to keep grinding at it, keep getting better, and pull the best out of their students.
But we all know the other side of the street. The vindictive, power-starved, bureaucrats who live for no other reason than to take mindless action without applying any sort of common sense. Those are the majority of people who work in education. Those are the people who give rise to the costs, and those are the people that other bureaucrats look at and think "we should reduce educational spending".
Those great teachers and many more who have aspired to be like them would succeed if we only cleared the path for them and paid them a living wage. But we can't. And we won't. Because bureaucrats.
#7 Reliable Safety Could Cost You
A lot of people looking for a home defense firearm go into a gun store and ask for the cheapest thing they have.
I’ve never been able to comprehend this, as it’s possibly going to be the single most important purchase you ever make the day you need it.
I’ve overheard people refusing to pay thirty more dollars to upgrade from a $99 rinky-dink hi-point to a more well-known defense.
#6 Reading Between The Lines
I’m going to get deep here for a second and say books. Why? Because when you buy a book whether it be a novel or an educational book we TRUST that it will either entertain us or educate us properly. But when it falls through and we aren’t entertained or we don’t learn. It causes us to stop reading and to stop putting faith in something that is so important to our lives especially as a teenager.
#5 Seems Pretty Counterintuitive
Phone cases. We literally put our expensive tech into super cheap plastic enclosures to protect them.
There for sure are more expensive and more durable ones, but most of us try to grab the cheapest and best looking one from Amazon and call it a day.
#4 Mind. Blown.
Your big toe. Pretty much free... right. But you drive a 2,000lbs car with it every day. Your life, your families life, and other people's lives are decided by your big toe... every single day.
Cleveland Clinic Health Essentials
#3 Quality Is Just Not There
Fast food, when you realize their profit margin and the cost of what you just ate is less than 50 cents means your butt is gonna have a bad day.
#2 That's Certainly Safe
New wiring and switches going up in one of our buildings, and I'm tasked with getting everything hooked up. I get to one IDF where all of the network cables are run, to find out they ran the new cables to an old location, on the wall in a custodial closet.
The switches in the closet weren't even in a rack but secured to the wall with two 90-cent angle brackets from a hardware store, and a couple of cheapo screws with nuts that don't even fit the bolts. How they stayed on the wall must have been a miracle.
The best part was when I tried to put the new switches in. The new ones were too big to fit between the angle brackets. I could have moved the angle brackets, but that would require me to find a hammer drill for the concrete, and move the patch panels, the cables were terminated too. Also, the electricians didn't run the cables with ANY slack.
I asked my boss what our options were, and I was promptly given the far-too-common "Make it work!", which was promptly followed up with the end call sound. Furious would be an understatement.
So, now there are 3x 15lb switches mounted to two 90-cent angle brackets secured with bread ties because that's all I had at the time; they come with the patch cables.
Someday, when we get some wiggle room in our budget, we hope to upgrade the bread ties to some industrial strength zip-ties.
#1 The Pen Is Mightier Than The Sword
A pen. A pen can be used to spend all of your money, agree to pay large sums of fees over a certain period of time, create a contract of legal obligation for you to complete a job or perform a service, put a child up for adoption, adopt a child, agree to a job, and pretty much everything else you are required to do. Pens do a ton.
